Ian Slater: South China Sea

At the Emergency Response Force training area at Fort Bragg, one of the recruits was puzzled when told in no uncertain terms that he had to take his dog tags off — put one around his neck, the other in his boot.

“Why my boot?’

“Because,” the sergeant said, “if we ever go into combat, you might get decapitated. Then we wouldn’t know who you are — correction, were.”

“That’s nice. Thank God we ain’t at war.”

“Sonny,” the sergeant said in his southern drawl, shaking his head, “we could be at war anytime. The new world order is disorder. Since the Berlin Wall came down, since Russia’s shake-up, we got more flashpoints poppin’ up than you can shake a stick at.”

Thousands of miles to the east, in the Pacific, west of the Marianas, the USS Enterprise was in its prelaunch mode. High up in the carrier’s island in Primary Flight Control, the yellow-jerseyed air boss issued the command for all hands on deck for an FOD, or foreign object damage, walkdown. A dropped pencil or, in the case of the female sailors aboard, something as outwardly insignificant as a bobby pin, could be sucked in and destroy a jet engine or take out the eye of a deck or air crew member.

The FOD walkdown, usually a tedious business with a string of sailors stretched from side to side on the flight deck, heads all down, was fast becoming a more popular duty — with females to walk with and bump into. The air boss didn’t like the new Pentagon order assigning women aboard all naval vessels except submarines. Quite frankly, he was afraid a male sailor’s downward gaze would soon shift from a deck to a bosom and miss something.

“What are you doing tonight?” a gunner’s mate, Stevens, A., head down, asked Able-Bodied Sailor Elizabeth Franks, who was a “grape,” a purple jacket, a refueler. They couldn’t help but brush up against one another, the line was so tight.

“I think I’ll watch a movie,” she replied. “You?”

“Ah…” said Stevens, a man she’d never seen before. “Think I’ll watch a movie too.”

“You know what’s on?”

“Don’t care what’s on,” he said, shooting her a knowing glance.

“How come?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said, “I come pretty much the same as any other guy. Only better.”

“Sheesh! Can’t you guys ever get your mind out of your shorts?”

“Nope.”

“You’re married,” she said, seeing his wedding band.

“So?”

“Hey, you two!” hollered a bosun. “Less talk, more walk!”

Stevens complained under his breath, “This is gonna be one hell of a cruise. See you later.”

Stevens would see her later — in the South China Sea— and it would be one hell of a cruise, but for reasons none of the five thousand aboard the mighty carrier could possibly imagine.

Amid the white and gold elegance of the White House’s East Room, the President of the United States sat in the center front row, listening to a string quartet playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” The music of fall passed into the bleakness of winter, and in that moment he felt the full weight of his office. Politically, the change from the cold war to the new world order had, ironically, meant more disorder than ever before, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, America alone was the superpower.

But superpower or not, it could not be the world’s policeman. It could not be everywhere at the same time. Hard decisions had to be made. Involvement in the Balkans and what used to be Yugoslavia — no; Somalia — yes; Haiti, yes. And every time the President made such a decision, it involved American lives — the world now so volatile in the absence of the Soviet-U.S. balance that trouble could and did start anywhere. Sometimes a place the President had never heard of before suddenly erupted in violence and was emblazoned across the world’s headlines via the vast electronic net of CNN.

In the music there were the stirrings of spring, but winter still held sway, and while the President of the United States listened to promises of spring, thousands of miles west of the East Room, Danny Mellin was still deep in an American winter….

One glance southward and Danny Mellin knew he was in trouble, the advance winds of the twister coming his way having already dropped the temperature to minus thirty. But he wouldn’t stop drilling — couldn’t stop. Besides, they’d reached 3,600 feet, and at $11.50 a foot and already in the hole with the bank, Mellin figured he didn’t have much choice. His sturdy five-foot-nine-inch frame stood out against the oil rig as he watched the derrick hand fifty feet up the hundred-foot-high rig swing out and help bully a new sixty-foot stand of pipe into position over a massive block, snow-dusted and black around its eye, looking like some enormous predatory head bent on battering the rig to pieces. Beyond, everywhere Mellin looked, the scene was an endless expanse of snow.

Danny, forty-five but looking older, was stamping his feet by the lazy bench, the relief crew warming up in the tin doghouse whose loose roof panel kept flapping in the wind. The bit was going through the Oklahoma rock beneath the barren, snow-flat landscape at just over three feet a minute, and Danny started arguing with himself — the logical, reasonable half of him telling him to pull ‘er out and wrap it up, not to tempt the storm, before they got to the four-thousand-foot level. The seismic maps told him he’d probably have another two hundred feet to go before he could hope for a good enough layer that might yield production— if there was any oil there at all.

Everyone who wasn’t a roughneck, even some of the “worms”—the apprentice roughnecks — thought that all an independent like Danny did was stand around the doghouse worrying the hole, and that when he wasn’t at the hole he must be wheeling and dealing in the taverns — that it was all booze and pussy talk. But Danny had spent most of the week on the phone calming down a landowner who said that the mud and drainage pit Danny had drilled last summer hadn’t dried properly before being “dozed” over.

Then there was the lease on the equipment. With the Mideast situation as dicey as ever, everyone who had a truck and rusty pipe was trying to make a buck Stateside, sending the rentals cost sky-high. Price of crude had shot right through the roof, and it meant drilling for wells in country that would have been ignored a year before because of cheaper oil. And it had brought out cowboys, along with the roughnecks, guys who were dreaming of a repeat of the big boom of the early eighties and who didn’t think about the bust that could follow. Already half a dozen guys, all of them over fifty — most repatriated from the Clinton cutbacks in the armed services after the Iraqi War — had lost a hand or a finger in the quick chain wrap as they’d tried to put on another thirty-foot pipe.